But I opened the door to find again, in a flash, my eyes unsealed.
In the presence of what I saw I reeled straight back upon my resistance.
Seated at my own table in clear noonday light I saw a person whom,
without my previous experience, I should have taken at
the first blush for some housemaid who might have stayed
at home to look after the place and who, availing herself
of rare relief from observation and of the schoolroom
table and my pens, ink, and paper, had applied herself
to the considerable effort of a letter to her sweetheart.
There was an effort in the way that, while her arms rested on
the table, her hands with evident weariness supported her head;
but at the moment I took this in I had already become aware that,
in spite of my entrance, her attitude strangely persisted.
Then it was--with the very act of its announcing itself--
that her identity flared up in a change of posture.
She rose, not as if she had heard me, but with an indescribable
grand melancholy of indifference and detachment, and, within a
dozen feet of me, stood there as my vile predecessor.
Dishonored and tragic, she was all before me; but even as I
fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image passed away.
Dark as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and her
unutterable woe, she had looked at me long enough to appear to say
that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers.
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